Saturday, January 26, 2013

Woohoo! I'm a bit of a best-selling (free) author!* Go and not buy it now!

Two reviewers of the book on Goodreads mention my story: one found it 'a very enjoyable read', the other thought it was 'great'. This is insanely flattering. I can feel my head swelling as I type. What I should be doing right now, instead of reading and re-reading the only five words of favourable review I'm ever going to get is write MORE stuff. I have a story half-cooked at the moment but unless I sit down and start typing over there and not here it'll never get finished.The new story involves Renaissance toilet paper. I don't think people are going to like it.

Friday, January 25, 2013

You sometimes hear people say 'Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.' An aphorism which, as far as I can find out, was coined by the author Peter De Vries. (And no, I've not read any of his books either.)

I'm not convinced. I think nostalgia IS what it used to be: there's just that there's so much more of it these days. Which is maybe the same thing. Either way, I know I am fed up with nostalgia. These days when 'retro' is cool, and pre-teen kids have a TV show in which twenty-somethings reminisce about what it was like to be twelve, you can't bloody escape it.

Remember when nostalgia was new? Something strange? Gods, I miss those days: weren't they great?

When I was a kid the future was cool, not the past. Space exploration. Rockets to
the moon. Going to school by autogyro. Food in tablets. Domed cities
populated by smiling, happy, shiny people with futuristic art on every
street corner. What happened?

Many many years ago (yes, Eben, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth), and there were only four TV channels in Britain, it was not uncommon for products in shops* to have the words 'As Seen on TV!' slapped on them as part of the packaging.
As a kid (and if I'm being honest, as an adult too) this used to confuse me - what was the point in advertising the fact that your product had been advertised somewhere else? What was it about the fact that Product X had been seen on the telly made it more important, or more real, than Product Y which hadn't been advertised on the telly, had exactly the same ingredients, and was half the price? Couldn't work it out. It just did not compute.

Then, one day, I got it:
Christmas LPs!** Every year, back in the days before Now That's What I Call Music cornered the market, there used to be, just before Christmas, a flood of '20 Greatest' Albums, Party Albums, Super Hits Albums etc. etc. all plugged to death on the telly by companies like Ronco and K-Tel. Products aimed right at the wallets of people who didn't normally didn't buy records - but had relatives who did!

"Ohhhh... I dunno what to get our Doreen, she's into all this reggie punk pop stuff - She likes music. I know! I'll buy her a record. I'll buy her that Ronco's Glen Campbell 20 Golden Greats that's advertised on the telly. She'll like that."

So. Next time Gran, who never normally goes into records shops, is in Woolworths*** she sees Glen's smiling face peeking out at her from the wire spinner of twenty-seven 20 Greatest Hits LPs and wonders.... "Ooooohhh... so much choice!" But then she spots a golden star in the top right hand corner of the disc's cover: 'As Seen on TV!' Hurrah! That's the one! 'As Seen on TV'. It was there as a reassurance. Yes, it was saying, you are buying the product you decided you wanted from the comfort of your armchair halfway through Coronation Street.

"Gee. Thanks, Gran...."

'As Seen on TV' could appear anywhere on the label though it was usually pretty prominent. Sometimes a big exploding splash of a star sometimes a diagonal banner across one corner.

Fast forward thirty years (Make that 'forty', ed.) and 'As Seen on TV' has escaped the narrow confines of the K-Tel 20 Party Greats LPs and Ronco Chopomatics and has become an internationally recognised logo.

...a standardized red seal in the shape of a CRT television screen with the words "AS SEEN ON TV" in white, an intentional allusion to the logo of the ubiquitous [US] TV Guide magazine

Wikipedia

This logo is in the public domain. Anyone can use it and anyone does: a while back I found (and posted) this:

As seen on TV - in some countries! Wow!

Last week in my local garage I spotted this on a dog blanket box:

I miss K-tel albums.

*Gods! There's a concept we'll have to explain to our kids in a few years. Physical shops. Remember them? They're where you used to buy Spangles....

** 'LPs'? look it up, kids, I'm not going to explain everything. I'm an old man; I haven't got time for all this.

About Me

I have all these bits of paper, backs of envelopes, sides of cardboard boxes, anything flat and blank enough to scribble on, full of half-drawn, stupid cartoons and idiot poems lying around.
For years I have been saying I must get round to doing something with them. For years I have been meaning to get to grips with learning how to drive our ancient vector graphics tools.
For years my wife has been wondering how it takes me so long to see the blindingly obvious.
I can't see the blindingly obvious most of the time because I'm usually drawing fish wearing platform shoes.